‘Like a video game’: Israel enforcing Gaza evacuations with grenade-firing drones
The Israeli army is weaponizing Chinese-made drones to police expulsion orders across Gaza, with soldiers saying they deliberately target civilians so others will ‘learn’ not to return, an investigation reveals.
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The Israeli military has weaponized a fleet of Chinese-manufactured commercial drones to attack Palestinians in parts of Gaza that it seeks to depopulate, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call can reveal. According to interviews with seven soldiers and officers who served in the Strip, these drones are operated manually by troops on the ground, and are frequently used to bomb Palestinian civilians — including children — in an effort to force them to leave their homes or prevent them from returning to evacuated areas.
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S., an Israeli soldier who served in the Rafah area this year, coordinated drone attacks in a neighborhood of the city that the army had ordered to be evacuated. During the nearly 100 days that his battalion operated there, soldiers conducted dozens of drone strikes, according to daily reports from his battalion commander that +972 and Local Call reviewed.
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In the reports, all Palestinians killed were listed as “terrorists.” However, S. testified that aside from one person found with a knife and a single encounter with armed fighters, the scores of others killed — an average of one per day in his battalion’s combat zone — were unarmed. According to him, the drone strikes were carried out with the intent to kill, despite the majority of victims being located at such a distance from the soldiers that they could not have posed any threat.

“It was clear that they were trying to return to their homes — there’s no question,” he explained. “None of them were armed, and nothing was ever found near their bodies. We never fired warning shots. Not at any point.”